Your homepage should do two simple things: (1) get people where they want to go on your site; (2) give people easy access to contact information.
Each visitor should be able to accomplish both of those with as little friction as possible. Far too many dealerships add bells and whistles to inject their homepages with a little flair. In reality, they’re making the homepage less effective.
You may not realize it, but measuring the click-through rate (CTR) of your homepage to your purpose pages (the ones intended to sell) is the best way to gain insights about shopper behavior.
Let’s take a look at why and start by reviewing the homepage banner, a favorite of many dealers.
Nicki Betterbid, one of our longest-tenured marketing consultants, took the initiative to analyze the effectiveness and purpose of homepage banners. This stemmed from various dealer requests for a larger number of banners — which meant more resources used to conceive, write, design, and place them.
Being an advocate for her clients, ensuring our time is spent wisely for them, she dove into the details and developed a recommendation we’ve give all of our clients and partners:
We recommend no more than 3 homepage banners.
Why?
- Only 5.99% of visitors click a homepage banner
- Of that 5.99%, half click on the first banner
- Only 0.86% of that 5.99% get to the third banner
Following our recommendation will give your internal Internet marketer or agency partner the time and resources to make navigating your site easier and let shoppers find what they seek.
If you’d like to read about all of the statistics and research about homepage banners in more depth, please check out our homepage banners blog.
Let’s look at some more shopping behavior.
Why Are Car Shoppers Visiting Your Dealer Site?
Car shoppers visit your site for a sole purpose — take a huge step closer to buy a vehicle. That means you need to have as few steps as possible to get to your SRPs.
In fact, every additional page that people have to navigate through, a greater percentage drops off and exits.
Your homepage should serve as a direct line to SRPs; thus, you should also monitor your CTR of shoppers who go from your homepage to your inventory.
As of March 3rd, 2018, the average CTR across our dealer network is 47.18%.
You’ll notice, however, that dealerships’ homepage to SRP click-through rate is all over the place. The question to ask yourself is, “Where do I fit in?”
If you’re not hitting our baseline of 47.18% (or you don’t even know your metric here), you need to start a conversation with your internal internet marketer or your agency partner. You may be unnecessarily losing shoppers and sales.
You’re in luck. We have an audit you can conduct to measure your CTR success.
Reunion Marketing Bonus Tip: SRP Optimization
If you’re here, you made it through the entire blog. We want to give you something for that. Since we wrote about getting from your homepage to your SRPs, it’s important to have some perspective on how to make your SRPs as effective as possible.
Here are a few tips from our team:
- Make it as clear and easy as possible to click-through to a VDP
- Ensure that your search filters make sense and are prioritized by user behavior
- Place mobile calls-to-action on every vehicle
- Don’t use too many form submissions (2-3 is all you need)
- Merchandise and market each vehicle through your site and channels
- Compare your inventory counts to your local competitors
- Shop your own site across all devices
We’re here to help, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you have other questions, comments, or concerns.